That’s the Thing About Field Trips

Going on field trips is just about every kid’s favorite thing to do at school.  A chance to get out of the classroom and have some real fun!  I don’t know if I have ever heard a student complain about heading out on a field trip.  While field trips should be fun, they should still be purposeful.  The students should walk away from a field trip with more knowledge than they had walking in.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that this is always they way things turn out.

Taken from http://www.RoyalSaskMuseum.ca

Last week the middle years cohort had a chance to take a field trip of our very own.  I must admit, this late in the semester when all assignments are assigned and due, I didn’t see the purpose in taking a field trip.  Aside from this blog post here the trip really had no bearing on me.  I thought I for sure had more important things to do for two hours, but away I went anyway.  Although I have lived in Regina for 6 years I had never been to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.  I think that students who have never been to the place you are taking them are always going to be more engaged.  When there are only so many things to go see in and around Regina, I think that a lot of students end up going to the same places in multiple grade levels and will take away less and less each time.  However, as it was my first time I was interested to see what they were presenting.

We arrived and met in the lobby where we were given a handout that is available to all student attendants from grade 4-8 who are visiting the First Nations Exhibit.  We started through the exhibit on the hunt for the answers to the questions.  A group of us got about half way through the whole thing when we realized that we hadn’t even seen anything in the first half except what some of the placards said to answer the questions.  We decided to put away our papers and just actually view the displays.  As it turns out, this was the point of the activity.  Giving students such a rigid task almost ensures that they will only observe what is being directly asked on the handout.  This is what the majority of the class did, including myself for the first half.  When we met as a class at the end of the exhibit we talked a bit about what happened and how that handout is maybe not the most helpful learning tool.  Then we got a new handout, one that didn’t ask for such specific answers, and took another walk through the entire exhibit.

Taken from http://www.RoyalSaskMuseum.ca

On the second time we just really looked at the whole thing.  Took in all the detail, the language, and the story being told.  I was astonished by the detail in each display.  The four hunting seasons was my absolute favorite and I found new details every time I looked at it.  Another really interesting piece was the quilt made by students at a residential school.  At first I was kind of impressed by the skill, but then I thought about it a little deeper.  The images depicted were strange and must have been strange to those who were being told to make them.  While there are a few tipis and other First Nations depictions, a lot of the images were of foreign objects like elephants and there were quite a few depictions of European men with pointing fingers.  A student project could be developed from that artifact alone.

Taken from http://www.RoyalSaskMuseum.ca

At the end of our second time through the museum we had a discussion about what we noticed.  A lot of it was negative.  The language mostly talks in past tense, as if the First Nations people no longer exist.  The meeting of First Nations with the European people is made out to be only a positive thing in the lives of the First Nations people, residential schools are not even mentioned (the blanket is described as being a quilt made by the students at a school on a reservation) and the outbreak of smallpox is described as something that just happened to the First Nations peoples.  The Treaties get a simple mural on the wall and again discuss only the positive things that were to have happened.  I agree with all those statements and think there are definitely things that could be done to improve the exhibit.  The placards are all outdated and there are

I do not however think that the exhibit can only be described as negative.  Most museums focus on past events, and there is always going to be a level of interpretation, but I still think that this exhibit on the First Nations people is better than not having an exhibit at all.  If I were to take my students here I would make sure to discuss critical thinking beforehand.  I would definitely not use the handout that is supplied by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum’s website.  I think the question that I would pose to my students before is simply “What did you notice about the museum that you think was done well or that could be improved upon?”  I do not think that you could or should try to take students into this museum exhibit, or any field trip, without some kind of background knowledge about the topic.  Field trips should be a place where students can build on their existing knowledge while they are having fun and seeing something new.

Learning to Work Backwards, Together

When I first started lesson planning I had no idea where to begin.  I had no template and no one had ever really told me what was supposed to go in a lesson plan.  The joys of being a forgotten about BEAD student.  Everyone else went into this year with at least some idea of “planning a lesson”.  Needless to say, my first lesson plan was not very good.  Since then I have been introduced to a few different templates for planning a lesson.  I can definitely say that the Backwards by Design template is my favorite.  Whereas before I was searching Pinterest and the internet to find the coolest activities in a given subject and then trying to match them up with the Saskatchewan Curriculum, now I start with what I want to teach, figure out how I will assess that they know what I have taught them, and then find a cool activity for the students to do.  Lesson planning used to take me a couple hours per lesson and now I know I can complete a lesson in under an hour and have it be really good.  It seems as if less is more, which is wonderful for me!

This week we were given the task of rewriting a not so hot lesson in the Backwards by Design template so it taught and assessed what it was supposed to teach and assess with a group of our colleagues.  We decided to keep the activity fairly similar to what the original writer was trying to do, but make solid connections between curriculum and assessment.  The lesson we created is available here.  We decided to shave the indicator down to just one aspect and teach the students about what the different climates are in the regions of Canada.  We have learned that we do not need to try to teach everything in one lesson, which I know was something I struggled with in the beginning.  From our narrowed down indicator we determined what it was the students would be able to know and do after the lesson and then developed a lesson to teach those things.

Group work has both positive and negative aspects for me.  For one, it is great to get feedback from others and to see how they interpret a project.  It is great to see how others work and to bounce ideas off of each other.  A drawback for me is that I like to work at a certain pace and I like things to be done a certain way.  That is definitely a drawback of my own work style.  Being able to adapt and work with others is a great skill to have and I will continue to work on it to get better.

Making Curriculum Ties to Agribition

Sarah and I were both tasked with preparing some kind of lesson around Regina’s Agribition this week.  Our students are headed there tomorrow and why not make it purposeful, right?  What was supposed to be a social lesson turned in to science for both of us, but I think we more than made it work.  Since I am married to a farmer and have fairly easy access to agricultural materials, I was asked to come up with something hands on for the students.  Even though Agribition has a bigger focus on livestock than grain, since we are grain farmers that is what the lesson was about.  I was having the students look at raw material vs. manufactured products and the process of getting there.  I tasked Chris with bringing home a selection of grains the next time he went out to the farm and he brought me back wheat, oats, barley, peas, and canola.  For the first 20 minutes (which was much longer than anticipated) the students got to feel, smell, and look at the grains and try to guess which was which.  This is where it seemed to fall apart.

Our students tend to get loud and like to blurt out answers so I specifically started by going over the expected behaviour (no blurting, putting hands up, no sharing answers) and then the instructions.  I have noticed in my own lessons that I tend to breeze through instructions.  Even when I am presenting something to my own classmates, I always seem to rush through the instructions.  I think I am maybe excited to get to the activity that I instinctively just say “Go!” and then regret later.  What is really hard is trying to re-explain instructions when 25 kids are talking (especially after asking them to keep it quiet).  So the students got started and I just kind of let it happen.  After about 15 minutes (with some students not having seen all five grains) I called attention back to the front of the class.  I took a moment that was not planned and asked students to give me a thumbs up, thumbs sideways, or thumbs down based on how they thought they behaved during that time.  They admittedly gave themselves a thumbs sideways and I let them know that they were right, it wasn’t really acceptable classroom behaviour.  We went over the answers together and I got started on going over the new material with them.

I definitely got into this part flustered.  I had a lot of material I wanted to get through and since we went over time I felt rushed to get it all in.  Then of course the internet was slow and I had to reconnect my laptop to it which flustered me further.  I rushed myself through my slides worrying the whole time that the material was probably over all of the students heads and that they weren’t getting it at all.  I definitely asked way less questions than I had planned, but I finished and had a student hand out the worksheet for me.  Having a student help me out was probably the best part of this lesson.  The students miraculously quieted themselves down while answering the handout and I got to walk around while they asked me questions and pick up the completed handouts.

When the lesson ended I felt like I bombed it.  I thought that no one was going to have the right answers and that I basically spent an hour teaching these poor students nothing.  When I got the worksheet back and began to mark them, I was relieved.  The majority of the students had gotten most of them right, a few were right around the halfway point, and only five really did not do well.  The five really did not surprise me as I knew they were not paying attention in class and so how would they know any of the answers.

When speaking with Sarah and our co-op, they both said they didn’t think I bombed the lesson.  Whether or not they were just being nice, I guess at least now I know how that feels and can try to develop some strategies for bringing everyone back to the lesson when things start to get away from me.

Next week I will be looking at self image.  I am excited to start again and plan on using an idea from Katia’s class.  If my friend circle we call it compliment hour; you say, or in this case write, nice things about another person just for the sake of saying something nice.  It will mark my last teaching day in this semester and then I will not see the students again until March. The only good part of that is that it means holidays for me!  I will sure miss them all!

Jen

 

Ugly Holiday Sweaters Anyone?

Today I took a crack at teaching Arts Ed to my grade 5 students.  I was given the instruction to make some kind of Christmas craft that the students could take home afterwards.  My first thought was “great, this is basically an outcome!” I had looked at the Arts Ed curriculum previously and knew that it was focused around popular culture, which luckily for me can be widely interpreted. After looking around for something that could be easily done within my classroom (using mostly paper, markers, and glue) I landed on Ugly Holiday Sweaters.  I know they are popular right now, and I thought it would work well to create a mini sweater that could be turned in to a Christmas ornament.  I made my own to see how long it would   take and then decided I needed to make the lesson a little longer and looked to the English Language Arts to add a written component.  I had the students answer (in full sentences) what their favorite part of the holidays were and what their family holiday traditions were.

My target this week was time management.  In past lessons I found myself not even looking at the time and then scrambling to wrap things up at before the next lesson started.  I set myself a 10 minute timer and an alarm to go off 10 minutes before the end of the class (which was also the end of the day).  I didn’t have the lesson timed out like that, I just wanted to be aware of the time and be forced to check it throughout the lesson.  I also, for the first time, took note of when all the bells rang.  In terms of time management, my lesson went very well.  In terms of the activity, it was a hit with both my co-op and my students.  They got started right away and needed very little instruction aside from the initial instructions.  In terms of students listening and staying on task for the length of the lesson, there is room for improvement.  I specified that it was an independent in their own desk activity because I know these students can be pretty high energy (i.e. Loud) in the afternoon .  I told them they could talk to their neighbours if they kept conversation quiet and stayed in their seats.  I even said to stay in their seats and raise their hand when they were ready to attach the string to their ornament or if they wanted Miss Wishira’s help at the glitter station .  One student listened to me.  Out of 22.  Maybe next week’s target? Not the worst idea.

More student creations!

                  

           

 

Am I a Public Intellectual?

What does it mean to be a public intellectual?  Well if an intellectual is someone who engages in critical study, thought, and reflection about society, then I am definitely one of those.  I feel strongly about certain social issues and when in the company of my colleagues or peers I am happy to have lively debates about the topics I feel strongly about.

While I have strong opinions about many things, I think that as a teacher I could get in to some trouble if I tried to become a social activist. This doesn’t mean I will not encourage my students to gather all the information about something they are passionate about and to make a move towards the change they want to see.  I hope that I can present students with information in a way that promotes respect, peace, and the use of knowledge over blind opinion and scare tactics as we so often see.  If, for example, we look at the #idlenomore movement, a lot of people have no real clue what it is about. On the news and in the media it was made out to be this big scary thing and the movement itself was never discussed.  The media focused on what the members of the group were doing (blockades, hunger strikes, rallies) instead.  It was not presented to the average person in a way that the movement itself intended.

I intend to be a tool for the social change that my students want to see.  I know that it will be my duty to ensure that students are aware of the issues that society and community face but I do not think it would be fair for me to tell them what kind of action is necessary.  I want to teach them the options and allow them to respond on their own in a beneficial way.  I don’t know if that makes me a public intellectual or not.  I think that the injustices we see are incredibly important, and I think that change is more likely to happen now than in the past few decades.  People – myself included – are tired of not being heard or considered when decisions are being made that effect them.

The younger generation is one in particular that is itching for change.  I think the recent election demonstrates this need. Young people were excited to participate and ensure that their voices were heard. A lot of this participation occurred through the use of social media. Social media has made it a lot easier for people to get their messages out, to discuss what is important to them, and to come together.  There is however a drawback to the social media monster. While it gives people a voice, the voice presented can have a very loud, uninformed, or ignorant message. I think one of the most important jobs of a teacher is teaching students what credible information is and how to distinguish it from non-credible information.

Teachers are often bound to this standard of teaching that makes being an activist (maybe especially in an impressionable middle years classroom) dangerous.  There is pushback from all angles; administration, policy, even parents don’t want students exposed to certain things in a way that is different than their own way.  A house who does not believe in the woman’s right to govern her own body may look kindly at a teacher who talks openly about pro-abortion.  A homophobic family may not appreciate discussion of equal rights for LGBTQ families.  But as Chris Hedges says in his Vice interview, “If everybody in power doesn’t dislike you are are probably not doing your job.” Maybe there is a need to push the boundaries to an appropriate extent in the classroom.  I want to make it my job to show that you are allowed your own opinion, separate from those of your family and friends.  I want to make sure that students use information to build their stance and not just the opinion of someone who made their mind up without first seeing the information.

So, am I a public intellectual? I am an intellectual and I will be working in a public sphere sharing social information, so sure.  Call me a public intellectual. I don’t think labelling me as one will have an impact on the way I plan to teach.

Jen Chyz

Today I Feel Like a Teacher

I taught my first real life full length Math lesson today.  I was nervous.  Math has never been my strong suit.  It turns out that things as simple as adding and subtracting are done way differently than the way I learned to do it.  This makes things difficult when you are trying to teach something that relies on some form of computation, as mine did today.  Today’s lesson was about estimating differences.

These poor students were subjected to a lot of Math today.  They started with their Bell Work (written and expanded form of a number) as they do every morning, then they did their Math CAT test (which is interesting on it’s own) in place of their Daily 5, and then came my 60 minutes of Math.  Way too much, but since that is what my lesson was prepared for as per discussion, that is what I taught.  I knew keeping their attention through my direct teaching was going to be tough after so much Math focus so I wanted to get right to the game I had planned for them.

My students were supposed to have the concepts of using front-end rounding, compatible numbers, compensation, and estimating sums down from their previous lessons.  Only trouble with that was my students were behind in their Math.  This could have turned my entire lesson into a huge mess, but I tried not to let that happen.  Instead I decided to take a bunch of things out of my lesson and bring the focus strictly to estimating by rounding to the thousands position and then subtracting.  I started by drawing a bar on the board with Ballpark Estimate on one side and Close to the Actual on the other so the students could see when it was appropriate to be far off than the actual or when it is necessary to be closer to the actual number when estimating.  The students required a little prompting to come up with examples that weren’t just numbers but rather real life examples.  It seemed that by the end of that they understood a little bit better.  For the actual lesson part it was clear who were the strong students in Math and who just didn’t get it.

After providing the students with a couple examples that we worked through together and introducing the concept of Benchmarks (without mentioning the term itself) we moved on to the game.  There were some students who performed really well on their own and didn’t need much instruction and others who needed a lot of instruction.  One of the most rewarding parts was seeing how excited a couple of students were when they went from admittedly not knowing what I was talking about to coming up to me to show me that they had gotten one or two completely on their own.  It was such an awesome feeling.  It is what made me feel like a real teacher today.

One thing that I really need to work on is watching the time.  That hour flew by! I would have loved to have had more time for the game and I missed my exit slip completely.  I think I need to carry my phone to buzz and notify me when I need to go from set to development to my closure.  I think I will continue to learn something every lesson, and I am okay with that.

Since I missed what was supposed to be my awesome Halloween Art lesson, I am up for Art again in two weeks!

Have a great Remembrance Day and I look forward to any feedback!

Jen